Water System Earns Grant

The City Was Rewarded With $182,500 For Building A Facility To Reuse Millions Of Gallons Of Water.

August 7, 2002|By Drew Dixon, Sentinel Correspondent

ST. CLOUD -- The city's efforts to reuse water and decrease demand on the aquifer are paying off in the form of a $182,500 grant from the South Florida Water Management District.

St. Cloud will receive the grant from the agency because of the construction of a 70 million-gallon water-reuse compound at the South Side wastewater-treatment plant off Michigan Avenue. The check will be presented at a City Council meeting next month. Concrete partitions in what used to be a retention pond have been installed, creating an impermeable barrier, said Bob MacKichan, city director of public works. Reclaimed water will be stored on one side and wastewater on the other, he said. The reuse facility probably will be put into operation by month's end.

"It's going to allow us to store about 70 to 80 days' worth of reclaimed water," MacKichan said. "We can store it without it raining, and when the demand is high, we can go ahead and use it."

Because the reused water will be used solely for irrigation for the city as well as more than 800 residents and businesses, there is no need to tap underground water supplies used primarily for drinking, he said.

"If you use water twice -- once as potable water and then it goes into the wastewater system and it comes back -- it's reused as irrigation water that prevents us from drawing that many gallons from the aquifer purely for irrigation," he said.

That concept was employed in various ways the past 11 years, mainly through the retention pond, MacKichan said. It was virtually impossible, however, to stockpile reused water when the retention pond had no concrete partitions. The reclaimed water was used almost as fast as demand. There was no storage of water for different seasons when Central Florida rains were at their lightest, he said.

The total cost of the project is $365,000, but because water managers liked the system and the city's efforts, they decided to reward St. Cloud with the matching grant, district spokesman Bill Graf said.

"They're improving technology; there weren't any additional studies that had to be done . . . and all of the sudden you've got a system that's much more efficient," Graf said. Many municipalities often draw directly from the aquifer for irrigation purposes.

There's no doubt the new St. Cloud water-reuse system will ease pressure on water supplies, Graf said. That greatly reduces the city's need to draw more water from the Floridan Aquifer, the state's primary drinking-water source, he said.

The concept isn't totally new, it's just that St. Cloud is improving the supply of reclaimed water.

"It's a very proven technology," Graf said. "The city of St. Cloud has already done a lot of this on their own -- they were just looking for a little help to make their existing system a lot more efficient and that's where we came in," he said.

Mayor Glenn Sangiovanni credited Harkley Thornton, Osceola's member on the water district's governing board, with helping secure the grant. He also lauded city staffers for going after it.

"I think from a regional standpoint, we're mighty proud of our staff for looking for the grants to help manage our water better," Sangiovanni said.